


Leaves

by sabinelagrande



Series: Aid [3]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Bittersweet, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Language of Flowers, budding friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 18:31:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15757341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabinelagrande/pseuds/sabinelagrande
Summary: Yasha comes back.





	Leaves

Yasha doesn't come back for a long time. She walks and she walks and she walks, marking the storm systems that move in regular patterns across the Empire and beyond. She follows not the stars, but the lightning, tracking the fleeting flashes in hopes of some comfort from her god, some solace.

That's not to say she doesn't find any. The lightning lights the sky, if only for moments; nothing is ever entirely dark. She draws succor from this, even when it burns to think of what she's lost, a deep hurt down in the depths of her.

And one day her feet carry her back.

She was never going to leave forever, even with Molly gone; the time has come to return to them, even if a sliver of her heart still blames them for what happened. And so she finds them, camped on the road to the south of Zadash, and she just walks up and sits down next to the fire.

The reunion is only slightly painful, and she continues with them towards the Menagerie Coast. They have grown closer in her absence, but they wrap her up with them, clutch her to them. It isn't like she never left, but it's not a thing that gets in the way.

It takes time for her to warm to Clay. He is a calm presence; he bends like a sapling, moves back and forth like she's seen drunken monks fight. She doesn't really know if she dislikes him, but she does know, even if everyone would deny it by now, that he is Molly's replacement. 

There is no replacement for Molly.

If Clay notices that she keeps herself apart from him, he doesn't show it; that is, in fairness, exactly how she'd expect him to handle it. He offers her tea or lends a hand to raise a tent or points out obstacles in the road that she misses. He treats her no better or worse than the rest, in his affable but hazy way.

When she's alone, she pulls out her book of flowers and thinks about which pages Molly touched, if some essence of him is folded up in them, like a flower plucked at its prime.

But time passes. It seems the world should stand still, but it doesn't. They grow stronger, tougher in body but lighter in spirit. Yasha is not always with them, but she returns in between. They always seem to have a place for her, and she makes a place for them.

They are on the road again; they've stopped at midday to water the horses, and something makes Yasha approach Clay, away from the rest of the group.

"What flower would you recommend for someone coming out of mourning?" she asks him. She wants to take it back once it leaves her mouth, and the only thing that stops her is the thought that Molly would have wanted it this way.

"That's an interesting question," Clay says, looking excited for him, which is still a little sleepy. "There's different flower language traditions. If you go by the gnomes-" He stops, judging her reaction. "You don't want to hear all this. Let's go find some flowers."

He picks up his staff and wanders away, leaving her to follow. She does, looking out as they pass for any sign of attack, but the place they are going is distant, the road desolate. Clay continues to walk, and the ground turns wetter, until it makes small squelching noises under her boots.

"This is a nice little spot," he says, pulling gently on a branch on a nearby tree and inspecting its leaves. "Good variety."

She looks around, and there are indeed multiple kinds of flowers and other plants, as if they have flocked to where the earth is moist and nurturing. Clay goes around examining them, rejecting some with a gentle brush, running his hands gently over others.

"Strix's wing," he says, breaking off a stem of a short plant with bristly brown leaves. She tries to find Molly in it, assign it some weight of memory, but she just sees a plant, more like herself than him, its colors dull and listless.

"Yellowroot," Clay says, teasing an orange flower out of the dirt, leaving an inch of the root as he cuts it free. He moves on, and she runs her finger over the hole it leaves, not knowing if it matters, not knowing if anything more will sprout.

"Dragonbane," he says, plucking a crimson bellflower, avoiding its thorns. Molly would have liked that one; its color is rich like overdyed cloth, like he always eyed in markets and asked her opinion on.

"What do they mean?" she asks, when Clay turns to face her.

"Dragonbane to fortify yourself against loss," he says, putting the flowers into her hands one by one. "Strix's wing for impermanence. Yellowroot because the sun is reborn out of the Material Plane every morning." He bends down, speaking in a confidential tone. "I'm mixing my languages but no one's going to come around and check."

Yasha looks down at the flowers in her hands and wonders if this has changed anything, if it will help at all. Perhaps it will; this is not a bouquet, but a declaration. Something is being said here, in symbols and not words, and Molly would have liked that.

She sits down with her book, arranging the flowers. She usually gives each a page, but these go together, side by side, a sentence. Clay watches politely, but says nothing, even when Yasha closes the book and ties it shut, using her strength to make sure the pages are tightly compressed.

"I would like to learn about flower languages sometime," she tells him, when she's put the book away.

Clay smiles, a gentle one that makes her heart feel funny. "I'll tell you all about it."

Before they go, she pulls up another piece of yellowroot, and she weaves its stem into the holes on the strap on her bag. It may not even last the day, but it feels like something important, a reminder.

They rejoin the group, and they all travel on.


End file.
